At Frieze Art Fair, the Well-to-Do Meet the Truly Wealthy

Taking a brief pause on their spring migration, a group of the rarest global highfliers alighted briefly last Wednesday on humble Randalls Island, where — not far from a homeless shelter, a State Police station, a fire academy and a psychiatric hospital — the contemporary art fair Frieze New York has thrown up its big top.

The stated purpose of this much-ballyhooed gathering of 200 dealers from around the world is the presentation and sale of blue-chip contemporary art. Yet as much as it offers a chance to ogle lots of what a critic for this newspaper termed modish “junk art,” Frieze also provides a choice opportunity to observe an elite group of people from among the ranks of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index doing what comes most naturally to them. That is, jockeying for dominance.

Take Michael R. Bloomberg himself. There he was on Wednesday, attired in a dark suit, a patterned power tie and tassel loafers and flanked by a Praetorian Guard comprising a former first deputy mayor, a heavy-hitting art consultant, his decorator and several refrigerator-size fellows, all gliding past security guards and onto the sales floor fully 20 minutes before the fair’s official opening.

Image

A well-dressed guest in the opening-morning crowd on Randalls Island.CreditHilary Swift for The New York Times

It says something about the pecking order that among those left to wait for the 11 a.m. entry time were Jerry I. Speyer, the real estate magnate and chairman of the Museum of Modern Art; Joel S. Ehrenkranz, an arts patron whose wealth management firm handles $10.9 billion in assets; Allan Schwartzman, a mighty art adviser whose three-person company was acquired by Sotheby’s in January for $85 million; John Thain, a former Merrill Lynch chief executive; and Dasha Zhukova, a collector and publisher and — oh, incidentally — wife of the billionaire Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.

“Primus inter pares,” as the saying goes.

In just five editions, Frieze has made itself a requisite destination on the global art circuit, a magnet for scores of the world’s richest and sizable numbers of the rest of us (Frieze organizers recorded 40,000 visitors in 2015.) Yet it remains, by some accounts, a stepchild of more venerable fairs like the 46-year-old Art Basel in Switzerland.

Still, it is hard to imagine how much higher one would have to reach to better the opening-morning crowd on any global wealth index.

There, for instance, whizzing down the aisles, was Henry R. Kravis, the billionaire private equity investor, and his wife, Marie-Josée, president of the Museum of Modern Art, to which the couple has donated over $100 million to date. There was the artist Chuck Close, ranked No. 5 in Observer’s list of richest artists. There was the billionaire philanthropist Donald Marron, pausing briefly at an immense central booth where a stuffed sheep with gilded horns stood imperishably afloat in a glass-walled coffin filled with formaldehyde.

The ovine was, of course, a work by Damien Hirst, the artist whom Wealth-X — an intelligence provider on ultrahigh net worth individuals — once rated the richest in the world. And the booth was that of Larry Gagosian, the hard-driving international dealer whose 16 galleries trade upward of an estimated $1 billion worth of art a year.

The pairing of Mr. Hirst and Mr. Gagosian was a kind of apotheosis of Andy Warhol’s famous precept that good business is the best art. It was also a symbol of reconciliation between two colossal art world egos, their first since Mr. Hirst left Mr. Gagosian’s stable in a highly public split after Art Basel Miami Beach in 2012.

“I hear Leo was spotted,” the writer and editor Barbara Heizer was overheard saying on Wednesday, a reference to the A-list actor and art collector and member of what The Hollywood Reporter terms the $20-million-a-picture club. Sure enough, Leonardo DiCaprio soon rounded a corner, so low key as to be almost unrecognizable amid all the sleek, tanned types wearing $800 Bottega Veneta khakis and $1,500 Berluti sneakers (the men) or toting Nilo crocodile Birkin handbags from Hermès, gilded clasps left unfastened with studied nonchalance.

And just then the former tennis star John McEnroe strolled past in skinny jeans and a ball cap and wearing a notably glum expression. It is possible Mr. McEnroe’s sour puss owed to the disappointment he must feel at being sorely outranked in an art world where a fortune like his (estimated at $50 million) doesn’t really buy much anymore.